When Heather Earnhardt opened her tiny, magical café, The Wandering Goose, in Seattle, she infused a little Southern comfort into the heart of a city that’s skies are often gray. Her specialty is biscuits, slathered with butter and homemade jam, piled high with fried chicken and bread-and-butter pickles, or country ham and an over-easy egg. In Big Food Big Love, this “red-dirt girl” shares stories from her childhood in the South and 130 recipes that contain a satisfying mix of nostalgic and traditional Southern favorites. Served up with a side of Southern charm, this is genuinely good and unfussy food that’s meant to be eaten with family and friends.

A bug's life is suddenly changed when a wandering goose finds his way to her garden. They become close friends, exploring and playing in the lush garden, exchanging poems, hopes, and dreams, and eventually confessions of love. When goose begins to feel his instinct to wander, Bug's life changes again, but she comes to learn that she is surrounded by enduring love, even in loss.

"Filled with heartwarming and personal stories, Heather Earnhardt expresses pride in her Southern roots through Big Food Big Love. Her recipes and witty stories are a celebration of Southern hospitality, local ingredients, and good cooking."

—Chef Emeril Lagasse

About The Wandering Goose

The Wandering Goose is a thirty seat Southern influenced cafe in the heart of Seattle's North Capitol Hill neighborhood.

The Wandering Goose is warm and inviting with bright natural light streaming in through the east facing windows. The demising wall between the neighboring restaurant is made from vintage leaded glass windows allowing for even more light and a sense of openness in this tiny but magical café. Offering Southern inspired breakfast and lunch fare including biscuits, cookies, layer cakes, biscuit sandwiches, hushpuppies, crock pot grits, country ham, sawmill gravy, country sausage gravy, greens, pimento cheese, chow-chow and fresh salads. All ingredients are seasonal and affordable fare. We will offer baking classes, cooking classes and retail sundries.

The Wandering Goose is an ideal place for both a grab-and-go breakfast or lunch or a comfortable place to stay for a while and enjoy your meal, your morning, your afternoon among friends. Baking and cooking classes will be hands on - you leave with what you made yourself! We have roof top beehives and sell our own honey. Families, friends or solo, the Wandering Goose will be the place where you want to hang out all day and get to know your neighbors and community.

Southern food defines Heather's views on a community, any community, and is a celebration of people using the agrarian bounty that is constantly around us, paying homage to the past but constantly evolving along with the seasons themselves, ebbing and flowing much the way our lives do. Our food at The Wandering Goose is comfort food, seasonal, affordable and plentiful.

Heather Earnhardt's Story

My roots are in the South. Everything about who I am now comes from this rearing. Born in North Carolina, I grew up with thick red dirt on my toes, drunken summer thunderstorms, evening crickets and bullfrogs so loud they drowned out your own thoughts. And lightning bugs! Lanterns of green light that we caught in Granny's old blue Bell jars, running around with sticky sweat and that orange-red dirt caked to our long thin limbs of childhood… my God I miss it. Everything in the South is more alive, vibrant. The people are louder, their laughter resonating in your own belly. The food is bold, messy, loud food that forces you against your own strong will to eat more, more, more. Over breakfast you talk with your cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and Big Mamma and Granddaddy and Mee-Maw and Dee-Dee and Dee-Da about what you all will eat a mere four hours later for lunch. And then lunch comes and you're eating again and drinking little mini coke-a-colas in glass bottles with boiled peanuts in the bottom because sweet and salty is better and you talk about what ya'll are having for supper and when the next ACC basketball game is on, who plays who, mostly who Carolina is playing, "now what in the world are all you kids going to do now?" your aunt says to all eleven cousins, the aunt who you remember from one of your earliest, first memories, Aunt Dee-Dee, so excited about the food, all the food, and that part of her excitement rubbed off on you in a way that you too got enthralled, entranced with the loudness of it all, the mess, the laughter, the love. The Love. Food and the South and their people go hand in hand, entwined in the way a baby elephant is with its momma for ever and ever and you can never shake this deep dark rich dirt from your toes, nor would you want to. It stays with you wherever you go, wherever you move, leaving tar-heal tracks. It's there always, shaping you from those earliest memories to now as you lift your hand gracefully, Dee-Dee and Granny and Granddaddy are all there with you, right there, as you throw on the thick sprinkling of raw sugar on your galette, not delicate, no, never delicate, but raw and messy and loud.